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Ecological regression

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ecological regression is a statistical technique which runs regression on aggregates, often used in political science and history to estimate group voting behavior from aggregate data.[1]

For example, if counties have a known Democratic vote (in percentage) D, and a known percentage of Catholics, C, then running a linear regression of dependent variable D against independent variable C will give D = a + bC. If the regression gives D = .22 + .45C for example, then the estimated Catholic vote (C = 1) is 67% Democratic and the non-Catholic vote (C = 0) is 22% Democratic. The technique has been often used in litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to see how blacks and whites voted.[2]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Gelman, Andrew; Park, David K.; Ansolabehere, Stephen; Price, Phillip N.; Minnite, Lorraine C. (2001). "Models, assumptions and model checking in ecological regressions" (PDF). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society). 164 (1): 101–118. doi:10.1111/1467-985x.00190. ISSN 0964-1998.
  2. ^ Jacob S. Siegel (2002). Applied Demography: Applications to Business, Government, Law and Public Policy. Emerald Group. p. 557. ISBN 9780126418408.

Further reading

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